税收竞争、经济集聚与地区投资行为

中国财政分权体制下的地区间招商引资竞争广泛存在。本文通过一个纳入经济集聚因素的新古典投资决策计量模型,考察了税收激励对投资地域选择的影响。研究发现目前在中东部地区经济集聚可为地方财政带来一定的集聚租金,这使地区间税收激励政策呈现为差异化竞争策略;投资的流动性、地区经济基础、投资的产权性质等均对地区的税收激励政策选择有重要影响。本文的研究意味着,实现区域均衡发展需要构建稳定的地区间财力分享制度、改善欠发达地区的产业发展基础。     

税收竞争、地区博弈及其增长绩效

中国的财政分权改革激发了地方政府推进本地区经济发展的积极性,但不恰当的分权路径也加剧了地区间的税收竞争。本文运用空间滞后模型,对中国省际间的税收竞争与博弈行为进行检验。研究显示,省际间税收竞争反应函数斜率为负,这说明省际间在税收竞争中采取的是差异化竞争策略;同时也意味着地方政府目前对公共产品的偏好较低。而对省际间税收竞争增长绩效的格兰杰因果检验则显示,公共服务水平对地区经济增长率具有显著的促进作用,并且地方政府的征税努力与其财政充裕状况直接相关。为此,本文提出应加快地区基本公共服务的均等化和转移支付的法制化进程,努力打破数量型增长的政绩观,从制度层面营造地区间协调有序的竞争关系。     

政府间横向税收竞争的博弈及效应分析

市场化改革、财政分权以及政绩考核等制度,进一步引发了我国政府间税收竞争。横向税收竞争实际上是政府间的一种博弈,是一国范围内不同辖区政府之间为了各自利益最大化而采用税收手段进行的角逐行为及其博弈过程。利用面板数据分析东、中、西部地区税收竞争与经济发展的关系,表明税收竞争对不同地区的经济发展有着不同的效应。所以,规范税收竞争,应从适当赋予地方税权、完善转移支付体系、改革政府绩效考核制度等方面入手。     

构建以财产税为主体的地方税体系研究

随着我国政治经济体制改革的深入,我国也开始了财政分权的改革历程,并期望以此来促进公共产品供给效率,解决基层政府的财政困难。财政分权的核心支撑因素就是地方应拥有可自主支配的地方税,且财产税和地方税主体税种的选择标准有很高的吻合度。另外,研究还发现:销售税和个人所得税作为地方税主体税种的合理性值得怀疑。在地方主体税种的构建中,综合国外成功经验并本着地方税收原则,建议把我国现行的房地产税收体系改革、整合为新的财产税,并以此作为我国地方税收入的主要来源。     

财政分权:促进国有企业效率提高的可置信承诺机制

中国的渐进式改革是政治集权下的财政分权改革。财政分权增强了地方政府发展地方经济的激励,导致地方政府间争夺经济资源的竞争。这种竞争提高了救助低效率国有企业的机会成本,可以作为一种承诺机制,硬化国有企业的预算约束,进而促进经济增长。     

Tax competition and tax structure in open federal economies: Evidence from OECD countries with implications for the European Union

Tax competition arguments suggest that governments that operate in an open economy (such as local governments) should not and will not rely on non-benefit taxes, such as the income tax. Yet we observe reliance on income taxes by local governments in many countries, and such reliance changes over time. Evidence from a panel data set of 13 OECD countries over the period 1975-1984 suggests that competition between levels of government (resulting in a vertical fiscal externality) and between governments at the same level (resulting in a horizontal fiscal externality) provide some economic rationale for these changes. Moreover, the evidence indicates that the vertical and horizontal fiscal externalities interact. These results have some interesting implications for fiscal policy in the European Union, particularly as the EU continues to evolve. One implication for the EU is that enlargement that increases tax base disparities within the EU (and is not accompanied by an EU-level income tax) will tend to lower national income tax rates, although this must be qualified because it also depends on the mobility of the population. A second implication is that fiscal expansion of the EU to include an EU-level income tax may tend to lower the reliance of national governments on income taxes through the vertical externality, but may also tend to equalize tax bases across countries, and so increase reliance on national income taxes through the horizontal externality.     

Vertical fiscal imbalance and local fiscal indiscipline: Empirical evidence from China

Based on Chinese city-level panel dataset, this paper examines the effects of vertical fiscal imbalances (VFI) on local fiscal indiscipline in a partial fiscal decentralization setting. We find that higher VFI induces a form of fiscal indiscipline: a reduction of tax collection effort by local governments. In addition, by exploiting the unique Chinese fiscal institution of “extra-budgetary” revenues, we show that in this case higher VFI does not alter local governments’ tax collection effort. Even though local governments also possess full taxing power for “extra-budgetary” revenues, these revenues do not contribute to the determination of central fiscal transfers to local governments, thus creating very different incentives for local governments response to VFI. Our results shed light on the working mechanism of the VFI and provide significant implications for improving the design of fiscal decentralization policy in China and elsewhere.     

标尺竞争、地方官员自利行为与财政支出结构偏向

中国特色的财政联邦主义在本质上表现为财政分权与政治集权相结合,所以中国式标尺竞争就表现为"为增长而竞争"的晋升锦标赛。论文基于政治委托代理的研究视角,运用经济学理论中的"经济人"假设来研究地方官员的行为逻辑,研究表明:一方面,作为理性的经济人,地方政府官员必然追求本届政府或个人任职期限的短期政绩最大化;另一方面,为了能使自己在政治锦标赛中获胜,各个地方政府在配置财政资源时会竞相模仿从而使财政支出出现"结构趋同",这种趋同性会随着政治锦标赛的升级而一直处于锁定状态。所以,地方官员自利行为是导致财政支出结构偏向的根本原因。     

中国式分权下地方政府FDI税收竞争的策略性及其经济增长效应

中国式分权机制下,政治和经济双重激励使地方政府竞相降低税率吸引FDI流入,本文考察了这种税收竞争的策略性及其对FDI经济增长效应的影响。模型表明地区间策略性税收竞争将通过降低外资质量影响FDI经济增长效应。使用1999-2006年省级面板数据进行实证分析,回归结果表明,经济发展水平相近的地区间外资企业实际所得税率具有显著的空间正相关性;税收优惠对FDI经济增长效应具有明显的阻碍作用;并且税收优惠幅度越大,阻碍作用越强。因此,我国需要加大对地方政府招商引资行为的监督和约束,以使地方政府放弃对FDI的盲目追捧,转而注重FDI质量,提高FDI对国民福利的促进作用。     

The effects of economic and political integration on fiscal decentralization: evidence from OECD countries

Abstract .  This paper examines the impact of economic and political integration on the vertical government structure. It argues that, by increasing the market size and the benefits of decentralized provision of public goods, integration triggered the recent process of decentralization in OECD countries. A panel analysis relates the degree of fiscal decentralization to economic and European integration, controlling for interregional heterogeneity, economies of scale, and institutions. The results mostly support a decentralizing effect of economic integration in general and of European integration in particular for heterogeneous EU countries, whereas participation of subnational governments in national decision-making is associated with more centralization.     

财政分权何时有利于治理?

当前,很多发展中国家正试图通过财政分权来加强政府治理。为了弄清分权在何种情况下、以何种方式发挥有益的作用,文章首先回顾了一些相关研究成果,探讨了财政分权对地方政府治理的意义。基于文献综述,文章认为,分权的益处与地方政府和政府间关系的构建方式密切相关。为此,文章提出了如下建议:确保分权真实有效;促进地方政府更好地行使代表责任、实施更好的治理措施;加大全国性公共产品的提供力度及巩固政治稳定。     

Fiscal decentralization and government size: The role of democracy

This paper examines how the level of democracy in a country affects the relationship between fiscal decentralization and government size. We argue that political regimes, proxied by their democracy levels, are important for different decentralization theories to predict the impact of fiscal decentralization on government size. We test this argument using panel data from 76 developed and developing countries during 1972–2013. We find strong and robust evidence that fiscal decentralization is negatively associated with government size and that a higher level of democracy tends to mitigate the negative impact of fiscal decentralization. Therefore, our study contributes to the literature by offering a novel insight on mixed results regarding the relationship between fiscal decentralization and government size in the literature.     

地区差距、要素流动与财政分权

本文在财政分权框架下引入不完全人口流动和内生劳动供给选择 ,针对两个不对称的地方经济 ,研究了政府的最优税收、最优公共支出和最优转移支付政策。我们发现了零中央政府收入税和逆向财政缺口 ,在有限政策工具的约束下 ,对应性转移支付也具有缩小区域差距的功能。不同级别政府间的服务竞争和税收竞争极大地影响了个人和政府的最优决策 ,拥挤效应和实际禀赋效应放大了通常意义上的收入效应水平。人口流动和财政分权提高了低生产力地区的福利 ,数值模拟分析结果表明高生产力、高禀赋地区对低生产力、低禀赋地区存在隐性的区域间收入再分配 ,中央政府的干预措施一般具有协调区域发展、补贴低生产力低禀赋地区的性质。结合我国东西部的经济现实 ,我们认为中央政府应该打破已有的利益分配格局 ,优化转移支付资金的结构 ,提高财政政策效率     

Sub-national political regimes and asymmetric fiscal decentralization

This paper develops a model to explain how sub-national political regimes affect the variation in retention rates in a country in which a region and a central government bilaterally bargain over the distribution of tax revenue given a particular tax rate (and thus fiscal decentralization is asymmetric). This study examines cases in which both sub-national and national governments have the same political regime (democracies and non-democracies) and situations in which the central and regional political regimes differ. This article shows that in the latter case, regions receive a smaller share of tax revenue for a broad set of parameters of the model (as opposed to the case of a pure non-democracy); in the case of identical political regimes, the comparative fiscal decentralization is determined by the productivity-enhancing effect of regional public goods.     

Public budget composition,fiscal (de)centralization,and welfare

Abstract We study the optimal degree of fiscal decentralization in a dynamic federal economy where governments decide on budget size and its allocation between public education and infrastructure spending. We find that full centralization of tax and expenditure policies is optimal when infrastructure productivity is similar across regions. When differences are not too large, partial centralization is optimal. With strong differences, full decentralization becomes optimal. National steady‐state output tends to be highest under full decentralization. We provide a justification for the mixed evidence regarding the Oates conjecture by showing that full dominates partial decentralization, despite being inferior to complete decentralization.     

中国财政分权、金融发展、 工业化与经济增长的省际差异

本文采用1978-2006年中国28个地区的省际面板数据建立了检验财政分权、金融发展、工业化与经济增长之间长期关系的协整模型（co integration model）,并采用完全修正的最小二乘法（FMOLS）对模型进行估计。本文把地方政府官员参与政治晋升锦标赛竞争的行为影响经济绩效的假设引入对分权化改革过程的分析,对中国改革开放以来地方政府之间的竞争何以在促成经济总量高速增长的同时又导致各地区在财政分权、金融发展、工业化和经济增长方面呈现出差异的原因进行了分析,进而得出本文的分析结论并对其政策含义进行了讨论。     

Rent‐Seeking,Market Structure,and Growth

We study the role of productive and unproductive entrepreneurship in economic growth, in a setting where firms compete in both economic and political markets. Specifically, firms compete for market share through cost‐reducing technological innovation, and they vie for influence over government transfer policy through rent‐seeking activities. We find that rent‐seeking affects growth in two ways: it allows firms to ignore economic competition, leading to less innovation, and it alters the number of firms that are supported in equilibrium. The former effect is negative, while the latter is ambiguous. We show how these effects depend on various characteristics of economic and political markets.     

The effects of vertical and horizontal incentives on local tax efforts: evidence from China

Tax effort is a measure of a government’s effort to collect taxes. This study explores what impacts both vertical and horizontal incentives have on local governments’ tax efforts in China. For consistency with the literature, we first include typical economic and institutional factors in our analysis. We find that the effects of economic factors on local tax efforts are significant, but the effects of institutional factors tend to be weak. Fiscal decentralization, as a vertical incentive, has a significantly positive effect on tax efforts at the provincial level. Meanwhile, fiscal interaction, as a horizontal incentive, is also taken into account in a spatial specification to explain tax competition among local governments. The results show that local tax effort in China also depends on the horizontal incentive. Hence, to improve local tax effort, the central government should let the locals have more autonomy in collecting taxes and evaluate local tax effort by referring to tax collection in adjacent provinces simultaneously.     

Fiscal crises,decentralization, and indiscipline

How does fiscal decentralization influence fiscal discipline and the probability of a fiscal crisis? Discrete choice analysis used with panel data reveals that crisis probability is associated positively with spending decentralization and negatively with vertical fiscal imbalance. These effects are prevalent in countries with a higher degree of tax revenue decentralization, while a stronger rule of law mitigates such adverse decentralization effects. The findings imply that reduced risk sharing against local shocks under tax revenue decentralization destabilizes the sustainability of a nation's fiscal system. Therefore, policymakers should be cognizant of the undesirable impacts of decentralization on fiscal crisis and indiscipline.     

Strategic Tax Competition in Switzerland: Evidence from a Panel of the Swiss Cantons

Abstract. Tax competition is discussed as a source of inefficiency in international taxation and in fiscal federalism. Two preconditions for the existence of such effects of tax competition are that mobile factors locate or reside in jurisdictions with – ceteris paribus – lower tax rates, and that taxes are actually set strategically in order to attract mobile production factors. It is well known from studies about Swiss cantonal and local income tax competition that Swiss taxpayers reside where income taxes are low. In this paper, empirical results on strategic tax setting by cantonal governments are presented for a panel of the Swiss cantons from 1984 to 1999. Completing the evidence on Swiss tax competition, income tax rates in cantons are the lower, the lower the tax rates of their neighbors.